Diana Athill: grand old lady of letters

The doyenne of English literature has fascinating tales to tell, not least of her dealings with some of the greatest writers of the century and her own ménage à trois with a playwright and his young lover. Here she talks to Tim Adams with the same piercing candour she brings to her new volume of memoirs

Diana Athill, at 91, is widely praised for her honesty, but as with all exacting writers she is as interesting for what she leaves out as what she puts in. "Honesty is really guesswork, isn't it?" she wonders aloud. One of the things she is in denial about is being a writer at all. In her attic flat overlooking Primrose Hill in north London, the evidence is hard to ignore, however. It's on the table in front of us: Life Class, a 650-page volume of memoirs, selected from four of her books. "I hate that fat book," she says, with feeling, quietly scrutinising my reaction. "I'm just an amateur, really I am."

Life Class: The Selected Memoirs of Diana Athill

by
Diana Athill

Athill's conviction in this assertion has its foundation in the "proper" authors she worked with in 50 years as the senior editor at the literary publisher André Deutsch: Philip Roth, Jean Rhys, VS Naipaul, Brian Moore, John Updike and many others. She remembers how the Irish novelist Moore used to tell her never to marry a writer: if he was not writing it'd be hell and he'd be wanting to shoot himself. And if he was he'd be in so deep he'd forget he had a wife. "I think," she says, brightly, "that is what convinces me that I must be an amateur. Writing is supposed to be torture isn't it? But I absolutely adore doing it."

Athill first started writing more than 50 years ago, a collection of stories, and then a memoir of her life up to the age of 42, Instead of a Letter. That book was an act of self-therapy as much as anything. It recounted, in flinty detail, the humiliating stain that had clouded her privileged youth – daughter of an army colonel, large family estate in Norfolk – and that she had been unable to erase. Athill was jilted. She had been hopelessly in love from the age of 15 with an Oxford graduate named Tony Irvine, who came to tutor her brother. By the time she was at Oxford herself, and Irvine was a pilot in the RAF, they were engaged, but the marriage was never to be. The war began, and Irvine, who had so lovingly set out the promises of their future together, abruptly stopped replying to Athill's letters. She heard nothing from him for two years, during which the pain was like "a finger crushed under the door, or a tooth under a drill", and then he wrote briefly, asking to be relieved of their engagement because he was marrying someone else. Soon after that, Irvine was killed in action. Athill subsequently lost a part of herself, for 20 years, in emptiness and disastrous affairs, 20 years in which her "soul shrank to the size of a pea". It was only through writing about it all that she surfaced again properly, found her voice. But then, just as suddenly, she gave it up.

"If I had something bad happen to me, then I needed to write so it would get better," she says now. "But then when for a while bad things stopped happening, I didn't have anything to write."

Her more recent memoirs were begun after she had left André Deutsch – who had never paid her anything much – and was pretty much penniless, living in this flat in a house owned by her cousin. She published her first, Stet, in which she told the story of her working life, nine years ago, and two more volumes – Yesterday Morning, mostly about her parents' unhappy marriage, and Somewhere Towards the End, about approaching 90 – have followed, to great and warranted acclaim. Having spent a career nurturing the careers of other writers, Athill is now in the curious position of literary celebrity herself, which, to her surprise, she hugely enjoys. She is in hot demand on the festival circuit, where people say two things to her. The first, which baffles her, is that she is "such an inspiration". The other, without fail, (and whispered) is, "Do you mind my asking, how do you keep such wonderful skin?"

The morning I visit her she is suffering with a cold, and irritated that she has had to abandon plans to fly to Canada where she was due to share a platform with the writer Alice Munro. "This is the first time I have had to cancel anything," she says. "I have been packing myself with antibiotics. But I got up yesterday and I felt so weak I knew I had to say no. So I think it is coming."

By "it" she means the end of book events and everything else, but she notes this, like she says everything, evenly and frankly and with an element of curiosity. Her singularity, as the books attest, has been hard won, but she wears it now with some pride. Her memory is her accomplishment; lapses make her anxious. She talks of a recent trip "up north to Wigton with a gang of young people" from her publisher, Granta. "We were all singing silly songs. I tried to remember "The Captain Bold from Halifax". And I couldn't get it right. But then I woke up the next morning and the whole thing was in my head." She sings it now for me in an unfaltering voice:

"The Captain bold from Halifax would leave his married quarters

To see a girl, who hanged herself, one morning with her garters.

His wicked conscience smited him, he lost his stomach daily

He took to drinking turpentine and thinking of Miss Bailey

Oh unfortunate Miss Bailey… "

It's funny what stays with us. As she is singing, I can't help feeling that Athill's own life has something of the texture of a barrack-room ballad, though she has avoided the darkest fates. Reading her memoirs in one volume is to have a sense of life as pain mitigated by time. There is a sense of wicked humour in many of her recollections, occasional bright flashes of possibility, an exhilarating sharpness to her voice, but it is the hurt, and her resilience in the face of it, that remains with you.

Athill has applied to herself one or two times Graham Greene's observation that all writers need a "chip of ice" at their heart. The question that her books never answer, quite, is whether that ice was something she was born with or learned.

She calls it her beady eye. "There was always a watcher somewhere in me," she says. "Before I ever dreamt of being a writer, when I was in my teens, I remember saying to somebody, 'I keep on hoping that something will one day happen to me, that will matter so much that I won't see myself as foreign to everybody.'"

The first thing her beady eye fell on was her parents, whose relationship informed all that followed. As well as being a portrait of a life in letters, Athill's writing is a careful unpicking of the emotional strictures of a particular class at a particular time. Her mother had been undone by an affair not long after she married, torn up with guilt, which she buried. She told her daughter about it the day after her husband, Athill's father, died, though Athill had found out long before.

"The worst of it was my father went on adoring her, and she would be irritated by that all the time and there would be dreadful quarrels. You have no idea how that affects children. When I was a little girl I had poor health, lots of stomach problems; later my grandmother said to me, 'You were a poorly little girl; it all made you so upset.' I had never put those things together but, looking back, she was right. You were always waiting as a child for the next time that things would blow up. Children find that unbearable to cope with."

Did the absence of love at home infect her own relationships, does she think?

"I think it did, a great deal. My mother was completely innocent when she got married. She was a normal, sexy, healthy girl but when a young man kissed her at a dance she thought she must marry him. But then it pretty quickly became clear I suppose that they weren't in the least compatible sexually. I have a feeling my father was a pretty hopeless lover, a parson's son. Poor thing. It is sad to think about, all those years together."

Her father wrote well, an elegant account for the Royal Geographical Society of a journey he took to Abyssinia. Her mother was a wonderful gardener, very good with animals and believed poetry to be a lot of nonsense.

Talking to her, reading her books, you get the sense that Athill measured much of her life against that maternal briskness. "You are not the only pebble on the beach," her mother would say. Athill's own candidness did not come easily as a result, and it was always an act of defiance. Her mother was still very much alive when she published Instead of a Letter, a book which catalogued Athill's own promiscuity and an abortion. How did she react?

"I did a rather sly thing," Athill recalls. "I had an American publisher who wanted to do it, so I did it there first, so none of her friends would read it. I sent that edition to her. And I heard nothing at all. For ages. We were going to stay together with a godmother of mine, and I planned to ask her what she thought. But I couldn't. And then I was driving her home, so I thought I would do it then. And then it was: after supper I'll ask her. During supper my brother phoned to speak to her. And she put me on the phone and he said, 'Mother was going to tell you never to publish that book, and I told her not to be so damn silly."'

And then, she says, a remarkable thing happened. They sat down and talked like two adult women about it all for the first time, the love affairs and the abortion, and Athill thought: "This is marvellous! We have made this tremendous breakthrough!"

It didn't quite work out like that. After that brief opening up, the shutters came down once more. Not another word was spoken about Athill's intimate life after that evening.

I wonder if she can see any virtues in her mother's sense of propriety, of holding things together?

"I suppose there were some but I can't see them," she says. "I always wanted to know everything."

One of the things she knows is exactly how easily candidness can shade into callousness: that is some of the shock of her books. Another relationship, with a lodger, the writer Waguih Ghali, continued even after she read his diary entry about her: "I have started to detest her… I find it impossible to live in the same flat as someone whose physical body seems to provoke mine to cringe…" Ghali killed himself subsequently in this flat.

Perhaps as a result of such experiences, Athill displays an unnerving sense of the limits of her responsibility to those she has loved. I ask her at one point what the best of times in her life have been and without hesitation she answers that it was "when I first met dear Barry and we had a lovely kind affair that went on for years".

The playwright Barry Reckord lived with Athill here for 40 years, punctuated by six years in the late 1970s when he brought his young girlfriend, an aspiring actress called Sally Cary into their home, and the three of them all lived together. If they survived that, how did Athill's relationship with Reckord end, I wonder?

"Well, of course he got so ill and so old," she says. "Now his niece is looking after him in Jamaica, thank God. For the last two years when he was here I was coming up to my 90th birthday, and all he wanted to do was lie in bed and watch sport and read thrillers, which he hated. When dear Margaret, his niece, called, it was like a miracle. He didn't want to go, and he still wants to come home. But I have pretty much stopped calling him now."

How had their relationship differed from a marriage?

"It differed right from the beginning," she says. "Our affair had been a good one and it had gone on well before he had broken up his marriage. As a consequence, by the time he moved in, the passion, so to speak, had gone. He told me right away he wouldn't marry again. I was in my late-ish 40s. Then darling Sally turned up, and we were both so very fond of her. He used to say he loved me and he loved her. I don't know if he did. She was and is one of my favourite people, though. She lived here for six years. It was perfectly easy. When she eventually went off, she met her Henry at agricultural college and got married. I think I was in a way more upset about it than poor old Barry, really."

Would she say Reckord was the love of her life?

"No, but I trusted Barry's love the most."

Even though he moved another woman into their home?

"Well, we weren't sleeping together by then. And if I wasn't sleeping with a man, I didn't see why he shouldn't want to sleep with other people. I hate possessiveness. Loathe it."

Does she construe her lack of jealousy as an acceptance of the impossibility of constant love?

"Well," she says, smiling, "loyalty is a bit overrated, I think. To make it important between men and women seemed to me foolish."

I have a sense of just a hint of long-overcome betrayal in her when she says this, but she doesn't acknowledge it herself, and maybe I'm imagining it.

As she thinks about her life, Athill is sitting in her favourite chair, surrounded by piles of letters from her past, which an American scholar has dug out of the André Deutsch archive held at a university in Tulsa. There is the prospect of a book of her correspondence with Jean Rhys, author of Wide Sargasso Sea, to whom she was editor, confidante and "nanny". She is loving going through the letters again, missives from another life. As she shows me little extracts, I hear the cadences of her abiding sternness of will, taking on all-comers, and living to tell the tales.

Athill faces the future in this spirit. Beside the manuscripts she gestures at a letter offering her a place in a "sheltered house" in Highgate, which she is planning to take up. "It's time, I think," she says. "I had a friend there called Rose Hacker, who was the oldest newspaper columnist in London. She said I must come. I asked her about the waiting list, and she said well don't worry about that, someone's always dying…"

If she were to draw a trajectory of her life, I say, how would it go?

"Well," she says, "a goodish beginning and then it went right down, and since then it has been rising steadily." She traces her finger in the air between us. And she seems determined not to let the upward curve come to a stop.